Early in the morning on Oct. 22, a Saturday, Ms. Zucker, 21, and her
friend Alex Fischer, also 21, were stopped by the police in Riverside
Park and given tickets for trespassing. Mr. Fischer was permitted to
leave after he produced his driver’s license. But Ms. Zucker, on a visit
to New York City with a group of Carnegie Mellon University seniors
looking for jobs in design industries, had left her wallet in a hotel
two blocks away.

She was handcuffed. For the next 36 hours, she was moved from a cell
in the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street to central
booking in Lower Manhattan and then — because one of the officers was
ending his shift before Ms. Zucker could be photographed for her court
appearance, and you didn’t think he was going to take the subway uptown
while his partner stayed with her at booking, did you? — she was brought
back to Harlem.

There she waited in a cell until a pair of fresh police officers were
rustled up to bring her back downtown for booking, where she spent a
second night in custody.